Energy-efficient sleeping modes for next-generation core networks

The increased number of devices and links in today's backbones networks of Telecom, in order to maintain quality of service during busy or rush hour loads, has become in a critical factor for the power consumption in communication networks. Unfortunately, current network devices do not have power management primitives, and the energy consumption is largely independent of the load through the devices. Considering these points, we propose a viable approach to introduce and to support standby primitives in backbone network elements, which can be effectively used to almost halve the energy requirements of the whole Telecom core network. Periodic reconfiguration of nodes and links to meet incoming traffic volumes and operational constraints of real-world networks, such as reliability, stability, quality of service, and re-convergence times, is the main idea of the approach that we propose, exploring the main features of backbone device architectures, as well as the network protocol stack. © 2011 IIMC.